Eva Landsberg is a PhD candidate in the Yale History Department studying Early America and the early modern Atlantic world. Her research interests include comparative colonialism and slavery, Atlantic trade and interconnection, political economy, and digital history. Her dissertation, tentatively entitled “The Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Roots of the American Revolution,” explores how sugar and its byproducts transformed the political landscape of British America. Over the course of the 18th-century, intense disputes between British Caribbean plantation owners and Northern merchants over sugar trade policies gradually escalated into larger debates about the nature and purpose of Atlantic colonies.  Closely analyzing these dynamics calls into question many long-standing assumptions about the imperial crisis of the 1770s. How did conflicts with Caribbean plantation owners shape Northern colonists’ understandings of their place within the Empire? How did competition for imperial prioritization inform their political consciousness? In answering these questions, her dissertation argues for the importance of the Caribbean in understanding the coming of the American Revolution.